The line of shame[ful lies] stretching from Srebrenica to Homs

“Anyone with a political memory is thinking about Sarajevo these days as President Bashar al-Assad’s artillery shells blast into Homs (above) and families huddle in dark and unheated basements trying to stay alive,” writes Michael Ignatieff:

With the bombardment entering its fourth week, those watching video clips filmed with mobile phone cameras feel the same emotion they felt watching the siege of Sarajevo 20 years ago.

It is the feeling of shame.

You know it is shame when “the international community” now talks, just as it did during the Sarajevo siege, not of stopping the carnage, but of offering “humanitarian” assistance. The very word is abject. The people in the basements of Homs would be insulted to be called innocent victims in need of humanitarian rescue. They have been fighting to overthrow a regime.

“Resigning ourselves to carnage is also strategically foolish,” he adds. “It will leave us in a world where any tyrant knows he can shell his own people into submission, safe in the assumption no one will step in to stop him.”